…Love is not love until it becomes flesh and dwells among us.

via Gift of the Ringbearers | Mercy not Sacrifice.

Thus I would be called a theistic evolutionist, though I object to the label. I am a theist, in that I believe in God. But my theism is not a characteristic of my acceptance of the findings of evolutionary science. Though I am strictly an amateur in any scientific endeavors, I do not modify the findings of science by saying “and God.” This is not because I do not see God in the natural world. It is rather because I see God everywhere in the natural world and not more so in one place or another. I do not see God more in my cat’s purr than I do in a pencil falling. Both things result from God. Science tells me how. Science does not discover God at some specific point. Science is studying God through studying God’s handiwork. But science does not improve its study of the handiwork by trying to pretend to find God at some specific point. That is why I don’t like linking the word “theist” to “evolutionist.”

via Of Creation, Evolution, and Worship « Threads from Henry’s Web.

I hope that by the time [my young son] is old enough to understand, the notion of a state passing a law against gay marriage will seem as misguided, plainly hurtful, and outdated as the notion of a state passing a law against someone of one race marrying someone of another.

via Velveteen Rabbi: Celebrating marriage. Emphasis mine.

As a thinker and a maker of mistakes, I found this quote to be revealing somehow.

My ex-girlfriend seemed to love me a lot more than I loved her, so I made the mistake of thinking I didn’t love her.

via Humans of New York.

The Slacktivist, quoting Mark Noll on the topic of American slavery. His contention is that the Civil War was based on more than just a political question over slavery, but also on a theological crisis over how to interpret the Bible.

While Rice methodically tied Blanchard in knots over how to interpret the proslavery implications of specific texts, Blanchard returned repeatedly to “the broad principle of common equity and common sense” that he found in scripture, to “the general principles of the Bible” and “the whole scope of the Bible,” where to him it was obvious that “the principles of the Bible are justice and righteousness.” …

The stronger their arguments based on general humanitarian principles became, the weaker the Bible looked in any traditional sense. By contrast, rebuttal of such arguments from biblical principle increasingly came to look like a defense of scripture itself. …

The country had a problem because its most trusted religious authority, the Bible, was sounding an uncertain note. The evangelical Protestant churches had a problem because the mere fact of trusting implicitly in the Bible was not solving disagreements about what the Bible taught concerning slavery. The country and the churches were both in trouble because the remedy that finally solved the question of how to interpret the Bible was recourse to arms. The supreme crisis over the Bible was that there existed no apparent biblical resolution to the crisis. It was left to those consummate theologians, the reverend doctors Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to decide what in fact the Bible actually meant.

via The clobber verses of slavery & the slavery of clobber verses.

Is the job of a television news reporter to reveal or to obscure? And what about a television “commentator” whose job description includes the latitude to frame the story from his own point of view? Are they still doing this framing in the service of revealing the facts?

Here’s a great line about those framers from an article about The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, calling them:

…gasbags he so deftly deflates – the cable TV commentators who purportedly analyze the news but pour the ketchup of ideology over it and obscure rather than reveal its essence.

To obscure rather than reveal. Great phrase.

via Jon Stewart Goes to Summer Camp | The Moderate Voice.

I found this article helpful. I will certainly keep it in mind at the pool this summer. The author distinguishes calling out for help and splashing about, called aquatic distress, from the reflex-driven response to suffocation, or drowning.

Drowning is not the violent, splashing call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. If you spend time on or near the water (hint: that’s all of us) then you should make sure that you and your crew know what to look for whenever people enter the water. Until she cried a tearful, “Daddy,” she hadn’t made a sound. As a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer, I wasn’t surprised at all by this story. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for is rarely seen in real life.

The Instinctive Drowning Response—so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D., is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect.

Our bodies have a standard response to suffocation that follows a recognizable pattern, but that also prevents the victim from exhaling large amounts of air to cry out for help. If you’ll be near the water for any amount of time this summer please read the whole article.

via Rescuing drowning children: How to know when someone is in trouble in the water. – Slate Magazine.

This Response to Wolf Blitzer Would Have Worked, Too.

This links to a Tom Tomorrow comic.

A quote from the William Blake poem Songs of Innocence and Experience:

And we are put on earth a little space

That we may learn to bear the beams of love

via And we are put on earth a little space That we… • literary jukebox.

What a wonderful thought: the structure of love, and its manifold foundations.